Power, privilege and rights: how the powerful and powerless create a vernacular of rights

Much of the scholarship on how marginalised groups deploy human rights discourse focuses on how these groups translate human rights norms into the group’s vernacular. The marginalised are not alone in this respect. The American Christian Right employs the power of rights claims – which they have previously rejected – to preserve Christian privilege at the expense of greater religious inclusion. This paper demonstrates that even the ‘powerful’ need to vernacularise rights norms and ideals when the group has no meaningful history of engaging with rights and the law. This shared process of vernacularisation highlights the plasticity of rights, and how they can be bent to serve the relatively powerful or the relatively powerless.